


rip my ribcage open (devour what was hers)

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Cunnilingus, F/F, Grief, Light Bondage, Pre-Canon, Strap-Ons, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vaginal Fingering, i'm gonna call this, sex as self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:53:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27843301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: Sometimes you just ate your cavalier, the love of your life, and you just need to feel something, anything.
Relationships: Mercymorn the First/Cristabel Oct, Mercymorn the First/Pyrrha Dve
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	rip my ribcage open (devour what was hers)

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the window after Mercy ascends to Lyctorhood, but before Gideon does.
> 
> This is very much not supposed to be Good Sex. This is bad. It is unhealthy and masochistic and it doesn't end well. Just so you know.

You are rattling around the halls of Canaan House like a loose tooth. There is something in your eyes that makes even God flinch when He beholds them, and you don’t dare ask what it is, because you still have not looked at yourself in the mirror and you can still taste the ghost of her on your tongue when you lie awake at night. You wear the robes He gave you like a sacrament and a penance. You cannot remember the last time you ate. Maybe you don’t have to, anymore.

  
Nobody has talked to you since it happened. God had taken you by the shoulders to raise you to your feet and embraced you as Mercymorn the First, Second Saint to Serve the King Undying, and you had not said a word. You had waited until you were alone and doubled over the bathroom sink and retched, as if you could spit her back out like a bite of rotten meat. You had scrubbed at your lips until they were raw and bleeding. They healed over within moments, leaving nothing but soft unbroken skin behind. The water tasted bitter in your mouth and you spat that out, too. There was a glob of pink spittle in the sink afterwards, which you washed away with dry eyes and steady hands.

  
So you go wandering, haunting Canaan House as a ghost in pearlescent robes. It is not difficult to steer away from the others, knowing as you do that with your ascension, everyone has thrown themselves into a frenzy of research and experimentation. You want to tell them to stop. You do not.

  
She runs into you on her way from the training room, drenched in either sweat or water from the pool, but wearing her offensively scarlet jacket and trousers. Pyrrha’s eyes widen when she sees you and she steps aside to let you pass, but she does not shrink away or stare at you in poorly-concealed awe. She says, “Mercymorn,” as you walk by and inclines her head. A greeting, not an epithet.

  
It takes you aback enough to make you falter for a moment, then you pull yourself together and say, “Pyrrha,” in something like a human tone and keep walking. When you turn the corner at the end of the corridor, you catch her watching you from the corner of your eye, still as a statue.

  
##

The next time you see her she is waiting for you at your bedroom door. She is leaning against the wall next to it with her arms crossed and she raises an eyebrow when she sees you. “You missed dinner,” she says. Her voice is deep and rough and even. She offers you a cigarette, which you decline with a disgusted gesture.

  
“What do you want?” you snap.

  
Pyrrha shrugs. “Thought I’d check in.”

  
“Why?”

  
Another shrug. It is just the barest movement of her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  
Her spear is leaning against the wall next to her in a mirror parody of her body. The buckle of her sword-belt glints in the light, polished to within an inch of its life. There are no creases in her jacket and her white shirt is spotless. You are irrationally irritated at her perpetual smart precision, and you know it is irrational, but you do nothing to address this. 

  
“Well,” you say, ice dripping from your teeth, “you have checked in. It was unnecessary. You can go now.” 

  
“I don’t think I will.” She pushes away from the wall and looms over your shoulder as you turn the key in the lock and open the door. You are also irrationally angry that everybody looms over you in this place. “Cassiopeia was explaining her latest theory about the stratas of the River when I left and I am not particularly keen on a lecture after dessert.”

  
You pause on the threshold, unwillingly. “There was dessert?”

  
“Maybe I should have saved you some.”

  
“No thank you,” you say. There is that edge to your voice that she never liked; she would tell you to lighten up and be nice. You can’t hear her anymore. 

  
“Anything else I can do for you?” Pyrrha asks. She asks it as if it were a real question, as if she expects you to make a request she can actually fulfil. You hate that. There is nothing anybody can do for you. You have already inflicted the worst upon yourself and now you are a dark and hollow space with one single dying spark inside you. You are beyond help.

  
But Pyrrha looms over you, one hand casually on the hilt of her rapier. She hasn’t flinched away yet, and her dark eyes hold no pity. Not even contempt. They just look at you from between short, blunt lashes. You have seen her fight; with the blade in one hand and the spear in the other, she is an extinction event.

  
You turn and grab fistfuls of her shirt with your hands and you pull, and she lets herself be pulled. Your kiss is barely a kiss — it is a bruise, a punishment, a plea. You bite her lip. She groans into your mouth and lets you. Her blood mingles with your saliva, sharp and metallic, and you can hear her heart beat, a steady wet thud in her chest underneath layers of uniform. She sweeps her tongue into your mouth and the rapier hilt stabs you in the ribs as she closes the space between you. 

  
You drag her backwards to the bed and down with you so the weight of her body presses you deep into the mattress, hard and sure. She threw her hands out to catch herself but almost crushes you anyway and you are glad, this is what you wanted, this is what you deserve. She kisses the corner of your mouth and scrapes her teeth along your jaw. Your hands find where her shirt is tucked into her trousers and yank it out so you can put your hands on her bare skin. You dig your nails into the soft skin of her back and she hisses, but she doesn’t stop you. Her lip is still bleeding, red blood on brown skin, glistening in the light of the single lamp by your bed.

  
You think, I am not thinking straight. You think, I will hate myself for this. And then you remember that you already hate yourself more than you had ever thought possible, so what is one more sin on the tally of your damnation, so what if you tear at Pyrrha’s jacket and belt and shirt buttons, so what if you arch your back underneath her to press your body to hers? You already hate yourself.   
Pyrrha Dve grabs your hands and pins them over your head. You buck underneath her although you know that she could break you in two if she wanted. Her grip just tightens, a warning, so tight you can feel your wrists bruise and heal over again, and when you continue struggling she breaks the kiss, rolls her eyes at you, and reaches into her pocket for a handkerchief that she dangles in front of your face. “We can do this my way, or I can tie you up.”

  
Somewhere deep inside you know that you do not actually want her to let go. You just want to fight something, someone, anyone, and Pyrrha is right here and she’s quirking an eyebrow at you, so you strain your arms to try and break her grip one more time. The cavalier rolls her eyes again and swings one leg over your hips so she’s sitting atop you, her weight pinning you down, and she ties your wrists together with that pathetic scrap of fabric that you know for a fact has her initials embroidered in a corner, and you crane your neck to set your teeth to her neck until you leave a mark. She groans; the sound vibrates through your lips. You are hot and desperate with want.

  
From one of the endless pockets of her jacket, she produces a piece of string. It doesn’t look like much but when she loops it through the knot that binds your wrists and wraps it around the bedpost, your arms are utterly immobilised no matter how much you strain. If you wanted, if you really wanted, you could reach for her muscle tissue and make her cut you loose, or you could turn your nails into blades, but you do not. You tip your head back and allow her access to your throat, your collarbones, the valley of your breasts. Underneath your Canaanite robes you are wearing a plain dress, which you only changed into when the blood on the other one dried, but Pyrrha takes hold of the neckline with infinite care and rips it open to your hips, and then her mouth is on you like she is going to devour you. You close your eyes. There are hands on your waist, fingers counting the spaces between your ribs, caressing your breasts, and you think this is too much and not enough and you don’t know if you can cry anymore.

  
You open your mouth to insult her, to tell her not to waste your time, but she pinches you, hard, and rolls your nipples between your fingers with just enough pressure. Your breath releases in a ragged sob. 

  
“Shhh,” Pyrrha says.

  
You wrap your legs around her specifically to kick her. She slaps at your calf, hard enough to sting, not enough to hurt. You wish she would hurt you. You wish she would reach inside you and tear out your heart. There is a trail of blood on your chest where she has kissed you. You can feel it there, tiny sparks of thalergy already fading away. Your dress bunched up around your hips when you raised your legs and bared your thighs, which Pyrrha’s rough palms map out with firm strokes until she’s cupping your arse and pulling you roughly against her body, digging her fingers into your gluteus maximus to hold you still as you try to rub yourself against her through layers of fabric. The angle is all wrong. 

  
“If you are going to fuck me,” you growl, “do it properly.”

  
She drops you back into the mattress with a soft thump. She straightens to her full height, towering over where you lie prone on your bed, peels her jacket from her shoulders and throws it in the vague direction of a chair. She says, “Very well.”

  
And then she rips your dress all the way down the front and divests you of your underwear and fucks you. Properly. She has two fingers in you before you have really registered the first, the thumb of her other hand teasing your clit with brief, ghost-like touches, and you are straining for more, driving yourself down against her hand even as she finds a rhythm. When you swear at her, she removes her hand and presses her wet fingertips between your lips; you open your mouth and lick your own desperation from her skin.

  
She leans close to your ear, nips at your earlobe, and whispers, “Be good.”

  
She only gives you one finger, this time, and spreads her other hand wide on your torso, holding you down while she coaxes you to a ragged, unsatisfying orgasm just like that, and this time when she withdraws you aim for her head. She catches your foot in mid-air, her grip on your ankle like a vise. “I wasn’t done. Patience.”

  
You want to scream. You do, a little, a hollow snarl more than anything else, and Pyrrha nods and licks her lips and kisses your neck again, so gently, before dropping to her between your legs and setting her tongue to you, flat and hard, and pinches the soft inside of your thigh. The ties that bind you to the bed strain under the force of your arms but your legs are shaking and Pyrrha pets your skin where she pinched you and focuses her attention on your clit again, finally, wrapping one arm around your hips to hold you steady while she pushes inside you with the other, and you are so desperate for it that you relish in the burning sensation as she stretches you around her fingers, thick and strong and calloused from years of swordplay. She wrings another climax out of you with shocking ease, and continues to work you through the shuddering aftermath, until you are so oversensitive you actually see stars.

  
You eventually come back to yourself. Pyrrha Dve is stroking your forehead with a sticky thumb. “I’m going to untie you,” she says. The blood rushes back to your hands with a feeling like a thousand biting insects. You could stop it, if you wanted. You do nothing. 

  
“Careful,” she tells you when you push to your elbows. 

  
You sneer at her. You can barely feel your legs, your heart is beating like a trapped rodent in your throat, and you still remember what she looked like bleeding out on the marble tiles, beautiful and terrible and like salvation. You shove your fingers into Pyrrha’s cropped hair and lick into her mouth to taste yourself on her, heady and heavy. When you let go, she only looks at you.  
“Is that,” you say, grinding your molars together, “the best you can do?”

  
Which is how you end up with Pyrrha Dve sitting on your face, her arms clasped behind her back in some sick parody of standing at attention, and discover that this new and abominable version of you does not need to breathe, not really. You do it anyway, to catch lungfuls of her scent and throw the occasional obscenity at her head, which she roundly ignores. She drops her arms when your tongue finds a pattern that makes her hiss through her teeth, and to your horrified humiliation cards her fingers through your hair, fanning it out on the pillow underneath you in some perverse imitation of a halo.

  
She comes with a shudder and a sigh, and you lick up every last drop. Rolling off you, Pyrrha pets your cheek. You almost bite at her fingers. The two of you lie there for half an eternity, panting, your ears a cacophony of fury and shame. Pyrrha is the first to sit up; she reaches for her jacket and fishes a packet of cigarettes from a pocket. She takes several drags with obvious relish and blows the smoke into the cold air of the room.  
When she offers it to you, you take it.

##

The next day, you sit naked in the bathtub as the water cools rapidly around you. Your hair is plastered to your head in a sheet of rotten peach. Her soap is still sitting in the edge of the tub, a pink cake the size of your hand. You haven’t dared touch it, even though you always liked the scent. You scrub at your scalp with your fingernails and try to leave a mark in the soft flesh on the underside of your forearm, but any dents you make just heal over without even thinking about it. The water sluices off you like a flood when you get out and you stand there dripping for a moment, shivering in the cold air, before you reach for a towel. A part of you wishes you were sore from yesterday, so at least you could pretend to do penance for your offences to her memory. Alas, you are not. Had it not been for the cigarette ash on your nightstand, you would not even be sure it had happened.

  
Hunger drives you out of your rooms and towards the kitchen. You already suspect that your body does not need to eat, fuelled as it is by the power of her soul burning up in the furnace of your own, but your stomach still clenches around nothing and twists in painful cramps, demanding sustenance. You wrap the sheer robes He gave you around your shoulders and take the back stairs down to the pantry, where you will meet nobody living or dead this time of day. The piece of bread and handful of nuts you choke down make you nauseous but you force yourself to chew, then swallow, and stare at a bottle of wine for slightly too long before putting it back on the shelf. Inebriation offers no escape, not from this burning chasm of grief in your chest.

  
If you tell yourself you do not seek her out, it is a lie. You find Pyrrha on one of the terraces, sitting in the shining light of Dominicus with her sword on her knees and a rag in her hand, cleaning the blade with meticulous care. She looks up when she hears you approach. She does not smile — if she had smiled, you would have killed her — but she nods as if you asked a question. Nevertheless, she finishes her task, because she is nothing if not dutiful, and returns the dirty rag to a box with tins of metal polish and an assortment of whetstones. The blade slides into the scabbard with a sharp hiss of metal on leather.

  
You make her take you against the wall, your legs wrapped around her while she buries herself in you. The edge of an uneven brick is digging into the space between your shoulder blades. She offers you the heel of her hand to grind down on and you throw your head back so hard that you feel your skull cracking against the brickwork, but you know it will fuse back together so you don’t ask her to stop. The shifting of her latimuss dorsi lights up your senses with the blinding spark of thalergy, almost as overwhelming as being able to feel all of her through the contact of skin on skin on your neck, your clit, her blunt fingers inside you. You do not know yet what all of it means, the firing of neurons and hormone receptors and neurochemicals, but Pyrrha’s body is playing a crashing, discordant symphony for your ears only and you close your eyes and ignore everything else, until she bites at your ear and curls her fingers just so and you fall apart against her.  
She puts you on your knees after that, because your legs are shaking, and keeps you there until she’s satisfied. As she pulls her trousers up, she pets your head, tilts your chin up with that rough, delicate hand of hers. “Good work,” she says. For a dreadful, atrocious moment you think she might do something unforgivable, like kiss you again. You bare your teeth at her, a snarling animal backed into a corner. But she looks down at you there on the flagstones, adjusts the cuffs of her jacket, and leaves you in the dying light.

##

Two weeks after your ascension, Pyrrha hammers on your bedroom door in the middle of the night. You were not asleep, so you cannot find the energy to be furious. In all honesty, you have come to expect this; Pyrrha Dve is becoming a habit, because it is easier to deal with her than it is to continuously drink yourself to extinction. The others would notice that, for one. They are still looking at you sideways, as if they cannot decide whether you are about to explode or collapse. Augustine leaves the room when you enter, and you wish you could slice his throat open with your fingernails.  
Pyrrha brought equipment. She is not wearing her uniform for once, just slacks and a shirt, but her hair is freshly buzzed and her boots are polished. She tells you to undress, and you do, because you are still desperate and numb and the shining robe sits like lead on your shoulders — that morning, God asked you to wear the rapier and carry the net, and both still sit untouched in the box that He brought them in, because you cannot bear the thought.

  
“Are you going to behave,” Pyrrha asks, “or are you going to kick me again?”

  
She does not flinch when you glare at her, because you have not stopped glaring at her ever since that first time and she has always been immune to you, the only person in Canaan House who does not startle like a bird from a cat when she sees you. When she talks to you like that, you would do anything she demands.

  
So you undress because she tells you to, and only scratch her cheek a little when she buries her hands in your hair to kiss you, and pretend to balk when she swats at you as punishment. You fight her the entire time she’s tying your wrists to the headboard and shoves you to your knees, your spine a concave curve from your arse to your shoulders, your fingers gripping the edge of the carved wood so hard it should have bruised. Pyrrha spreads her hands on your hips and runs them up your back. Her thumbs knead your trapezius for a moment before she pushes your head down. You try to resist, just to be contrary; she smacks you, hard. Air hisses out from between your teeth. You want her to do it again.

  
“Be good,” she tells you, and briefly ghosts her fingers over your clit to make you ache and squirm to prolong contact before leaving you, rather bereft, to your own devices. The mattress shifts as she leaves the bed and she removes her clothes with a great rustle of stiffly starched fabric. There is the sound of leather on skin and the metallic clinking of buckles, and Pyrrha hums in the back of her throat in a way that always sinks straight down to your cunt.

  
Returning to the bed, she fits yourself to you, covering your body with hers; her hands, with those thick, blunt fingers, reach around to pinch your nipples while she kisses a messy path down your spine. You push back as if to shake her off just so she’ll punish you for it, but instead she murmurs something like “shhhh” into your ear and straightens up, gripping your hip with one hand. She runs the other up the inside of your thigh to your clit and lingers there a moment. The tip of something blunt and hard comes to rest gently against your entrance. You let out a moan, unable to keep your mouth shut, and twist your head to look.

  
She pushes your head back down. “Yes or no,” she says. “Either’s fine with me.”

  
“Fuck you,” you say, and, “Yes,” and Pyrrha has the nerve to kiss the point of your shoulder blade before she presses in, inch by infuriating inch. You’ve been aching to be filled since the moment she knocked on your door, but she has barely touched you and you aren’t quite ready; it hurts, and you could probably do something about it if you concentrated and nudged your body in the right direction, but the sting and pressure blend with the feeling of your shoulders burning and the tightness of the rope around your wrists and this is good, this is perfect, this is agony. You try to push back but she stops you, hands on your hips again, fingers digging into your flesh.

  
“Is this what you want?” she asks, almost gently. “Is this what you want from me?” She snaps her hips forward, rendering you briefly incoherent.

  
Heart hammering in your chest, you grind your teeth. “Yes.”

  
Her voice is so low it vibrates through your body when she says, “Good,” and finally starts to fuck you in earnest, the hard length of silicone buried inside you, every thrust accompanied by the impact of flesh on flesh. You whimper a little and hate yourself for it, but she grabs you by the hair and drags your head back and pushes a finger into your mouth to shut you up, and just when the pain begins to ebb and your thoughts come crowding the edges of your awareness again, she slips that finger between your legs and finally touches your clit, matching the rhythm she is setting with your hips, until you drop your head again and let yourself become insensate.

  
She makes you come four times that night, with her hands, with her mouth, and makes you pay her back with ruthless, impassive commands. By the time she is done with you, you cannot remember what day it is. It is the most content you have been in weeks.

  
She slips out of the room just as you are drifting off to an uneasy sleep, not quite recovered from the last round. You will sleep for fifteen hours and wake up starving, and for the first time since your ascension you will slink down to the dining room for breakfast with your fellow disciples. You sip at a cup of tepid tea and occasionally swirl your spoon in an untouched bowl of soup, but Valancy only startles the once when she walks in and recovers her composure immediately. Around you, conversations hum in hushed tones and you do not care enough to pay attention until Gideon walks in and sits opposite you, a new set of robes in iridescent white around his shoulders, and the wrong eyes staring back at you across the table.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! I promise I'll eventually get back to writing happier things, whoops.  
> The original idea was 'what if Augustine and God were literally the only two people who didn't get in Pyrrha's pants' and then I started thinking about The Implications and it got sad.  
> Shoutout to [gallpall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallpall/pseuds/gallpall) who is also writing something based on this prompt that I am told is going to be vastly more cheerful - keep an eye out!


End file.
